July 2011

After three nights in Jinja we crossed back into Kenya, spending a night in Eldoret before getting to Lake Naivasha. While there we biked through the nearby Hell’s Gate National Park which turned out to be a lot harder and…

Like someone slowly unpacking after a long journey, I feel like I finally got to the bottom of my suitcase with that last post about Africa. Meanwhile the world kept spinning. During our first two weeks in France, we stayed…

I arrived in France bookless. Which is to say I just couldn’t get into Look Homeward, Angel, a brick I’d been lugging around since Chiang Mai. Chris, Stephanie’s Mom, checked out Les Pages Jaunes, and found a place in Cannes…

Corsica was a great destination for my stick-shift practice. Outside of the cities, we had the roads nearly all to ourselves, so I didn’t have much to worry about other than shifting to match the road conditions, which tended to…

Sometimes it takes a few years for a plan to come together. I think it was during our second trip to France that I first heard about “Aqua Rando” (short for Aqua Randonnée, literally: Water Hiking) where people don wet…

Rather than take the ferry back to Nice, we embarked on something of a mini European road trip. Departing Corsica from Bastia, we arrived in Livorno, on the west coast of Italy, and drove to Florence (which, by the way,…

Parma started out as a whim. I mean, when people think about visiting Italy they usually think: Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, Milan—not Parma. But while looking at the cities between Florence and France, I thought to myself, “Hey we like…

I noticed some traffic coming from the Russian Facebook-clone Vkontakte (aka VK), and it turns out that this was the source: Google translates the Cyrillic, “СКОРО на туалетной бумаге”, as: COMING SOON on toilet paper. Ohhhk. Wait. Why does that…

File this under “reading the news in my analytics“: I noticed an inordinate number of people visiting my old 2006 Yosemite, finally! post (as in, over 1,000). Most got there because they were searching for Vernal Fall. “Hmm”, I thought to myself, “I wonder if something happened?” I checked Google News and sure enough, right there at the top of the page: Yosemite: 3 presumed dead, swept over Vernal Fall. Absolutely horrifying. #